Code Jumper

by Zachariah Dracoulis

  “Ah, for what you lack in the creativity department you more than makeup for in intelligence.” Tony replied as I tried to figure out the best way to deal with him.

  I needed something smart, something quiet that he couldn’t instantly pick up on, something that I couldn’t for the life of me figure out.

  “Why don’t you just go ahead and clear all this cloud, eh?” I mocked, knowing full well how difficult it’d be to simply make it disappear after I’d tampered with it, “I’m sure someone as God-like as you can figure out a way to make all this mist go buh-bye.”

  Quinn sucked through her teeth quietly at that, but still loud enough so that I’d hear it, “As much as I respect the fact that you’re a bit of a smart ass, it might not be the best idea to taunt him like this.”

  “Don’t worry,” I whispered back, “I’ve got a plan.”

  That was a lie, but it was done in the hopes that it would actually spur forth a plan, so I think it’s okay.

  “I’m getting tired of waiting for you to show yourself,” Tony warned, “do you really want to-”

  I took that as my opportunity to do something really stupid, and snapped my fingers.

  Unsurprisingly, Tony looked in my general direction, casting some kind of fireball that went wide right as the cloud dissipated, before looking over to what I’d summoned.

  The engine roared, the tires squealed, and, with what looked like a burst of fire coming out of the exhaust, my car hammered toward Tony, hitting him in the back before he could react and only just barely missing Callomezi who dove out of the way at the last minute.

  I blinked hard and got rid of the infrared vision before Tony managed to turn my beautiful car into a bubble that he fell into, was briefly trapped inside of, and quickly popped, showering him with suds.

  “Nice job,” Tony grunted as he rolled his shoulders, sending an echo of cracks and crunches my way while his body repaired itself, “but not quite enough to save your ass.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s why I’ve got this bad boy,” I replied with a sly grin before pulling the empty inhaler out of my pocket, “and a second one in cas-”

  The stupid prick didn’t even let me finish my sentence before twisting his hand and making the inhaler from my pocket land in his palm, “Owen’s Freedom Two?” he mocked with an exaggerated laugh, “You do know that this shit just makes you invisible to the security system, right? There’s no hoodoo or wizardry here.”

  “Uh, yeah, until I tampered with it and made it something way better.” I replied before sticking the nozzle in my mouth and pushing down on the canister, doing little more than puffing a small amount of air into the back of my throat.

  Not to be outdone, Tony quickly did the same, huffing down the mess of broken code that Quinn had so elegantly altered, and I only just barely managed to keep myself from grinning.

  “Well, shit…” I muttered, casting the inhaler to my side, “I s’pose this’ll just have to be a fair fight.”

  Before Tony could respond I snapped my fingers, summoning my greatest weapon.

  Doctor Fuzzles Two, a version of the original Doctor Fuzzles that was exactly the same except for the red stripe running up his back.

  At first Tony scoffed, watching as the bunny rubbed up against my leg and hopped around my feet playfully, but then a face of dark realization and rage washed over him, like when Vegeta saw Goku’s true power level.

  “Go get ‘im.” I ordered with cheeky little grin.

  Doctor Fuzzles Two being Doctor Fuzzles Two, moved on Tony with the speed of a tweaker running from the monsters in his head.

  Tony wasn’t about to go down without a fight though, and quickly slammed on the ground, sending a ripple along the field that I only just managed to protect myself from by punching one of the waves, returning it to Tony with a vengeance.

  I didn’t see him do it, but I assumed that Tony flattened out the terrain once more as the distortion disappeared in an instant.

  “You really think that something like that would be able to stop something lik-” Tony started then abruptly stopped as Doctor Fuzzles Two fell from the sky and hit the ground with a bloody splat, eliciting a gasp from Quinn.

  “He killed the rabbit.” Quinn whispered in shock.

  “Dude!” I shouted at the utterly stunned Tony, “You killed my rabbit!”

  Of course, I wasn’t actually outraged at the fact that he’d killed Doctor Fuzzles Two, but it worked well to mess with Tony’s head to think that I did, made him a reflect on it more anyway.

  “Seriously, what the Hell!?” I barked, hoping to turn Tony into a stuttering fool long enough for me to kill him.

  My continued scolding had the opposite effect though, and before I knew what was happening, Tony had snapped back to reality and was staring me down with a newfound fire.

  “Oh…” I breathed, “Oh, oh no…”

  Without saying a word, Tony started raising his right hand palm side up, a horde of the undead exhuming themselves from the concrete and wallpaper in response, causing a lump to climb up my throat.

  “Do something!” Quinn shrieked as I stood there frozen in place, watching as each set of the pale, dead eyes found me.

  “Had to be zombies, didn’t it?” I gulped, “This’d be a great time for Hugo to tell me this has all been some bullshit glitch with his AR tech…”

  “No such luck I’m afraid,” Tony mocked as the last of his zombies joined us on the plane, “you ready?”

  “In a word?” I asked, my eyes shooting around between all the undead in my immediate vision, “No.”

  “Sweet’s The Ballroom Blitz now playing,” Quinn announced before letting the drum beat rock across the battlefield, “kick his fucking ass.”

  I don’t know whether it was the fact that she played one of my favorite songs of all time, or if it was because she swore, but suddenly all the fear in me got smothered by an undeniable need to kill Tony.

  With a snap of my fingers, the zombies started exploding, coating everything in blood as I ran for Tony who was far too focused on his army dying to notice me.

  “Tally-ho!” I grunted before jumping and kicking Tony in the chest with all the force of ten gorillas, sending him flying backward and right off the edge of the battleground while I was left to fall flat on my back in a pile of blood and viscera.

  “Tally-ho?” Quinn laughed as I tried to catch my breath, “Of all the things you could’ve said before defeating one of your nemeses, you went with ‘tally-ho’?”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I replied as the adrenaline in my system started to settle down and my heart rate slowed to a more human rate, “I like being original. Besides, you’re just pissed that I didn’t end up needing your trump card. Gotta admit though, I’m a bit bummed that we wasted Ballroom Blitz on tha-”

  I was cut short by the unmistakable sound of heavy wings beating against the air.

  “No…” I trailed off as I scrambled up to my feet, slipping more than a few times, “No way…”

  “Yes way!” Tony roared before rising into view atop a mighty black and red dragon, “Time to die!”

  “Well, he’s not subtle…” I muttered, looking up at the gargantuan dragon, its thorny head contorted in a terrifying mix of rage and hunger.

  “Much to our benefit.” Quinn whispered with unabashed pride, “They’re on their way. You may want to take a few steps back.”

  I smiled and started walking backward, “You really should have taken at least a little look at that inhaler before huffing it down.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Tony snarled, hovering there with his dragon that was staring at me like I was perfect steak walking in a pile of bacon.

  “Means you’re the girl who thought it’d be fun to scarf down those ‘shrooms,” I replied before sitting down roughly where I thought the hallway used to be, keeping an eye on the still cowering Callomezi as I did so, “and now the Devil’s gonna come and try to eat your soul through your eyeballs.”<
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  Tony didn’t catch my meaning immediately, but his sudden comprehension was so intense that I could see it from where I sat.

  “No!” the former Code Jumper desperately roared as the zombie remains started disappearing with flashes of blue light and code, “No!”

  “Afraid so.” I said, my voice starting to lose some of its delighted confidence as I started remembering who Tony was before.

  Sure, he’d always been a dick, but that guy didn’t deserve to get ripped apart, and I was struggling to decide whether or not the dragon-riding soldier of Messiah in front of me did.

  The building started to fold back into its normal form around me, something that made Callomezi panic and drop into a ball on the ground.

  “Sorry,” I said with genuine sadness as I watched my old friend and his dragon disappear in a screaming explosion of blue, “wish it could’ve gone any other way…”

  ALMOST THERE...

  Once the building had decided to stop shifting and realigning itself, I got up to my feet, snapping my fingers as I did so and turning my revolver back into its old, bullet-shooting self.

  “You going to go in there and execute him or something?” Quinn asked as I strode toward Callomezi’s office.

  “That’s the plan, yeah.” I replied more coldly than I’d intended to before kicking in the door, “Sniveling little weasel has it coming.”

  “Does he though?”

  It was a fair question, looking down at the emasculated man I couldn’t help but pity him, and then I saw that he was still clutching the book.

  “Callomezi,” I snapped, making him flinch, “look at me or I’m gonna blow your head off, and that shit’s going to be permanent when or if I destroy that book of yours.”

  I didn’t know it at the time, but something about Tony’s death had made me want to get the Hell out of the base game. I say ‘something’ when I know I mean ‘he was a friend and it’s hard to think about what I would’ve done if Messiah had come to me instead of him’, though I’m not really the best at focusing on that kind of stuff.

  “Don!” I barked, the sudden change in volume finally getting him to look at me, “Good, now, tell me what you plan to do with that book.”

  Callomezi was a mess, a stammering, shivering, comprehensively defeated and destroyed mess.

  “Open your mouth and let the words come out, alright? What are you gonna do with that book?”

  “M-m-make a better wor-”

  I finished his sentence for him by shooting him in the head, splattering the floor behind him in blood as, with a few good jitters, his eyes rolled into the back of what was left of his skull and he fell backward, his fingers still tightly wrapped around the leather book.

  “How did you know he wasn’t telling the truth?” Quinn asked calmly as I squatted down and peeled the book from his grasp.

  “Because he knew that he couldn’t create a ‘better world’, not with half the present world wanting his head on a freakin’ pike.”

  Quinn hesitated for a moment while I broke the book down into nothing, destroying the foreign piece of code and hoping to God that it was enough to set the world back on the right path, “You were never gonna let him live, were you?”

  “Nope,” I said as I got up to my feet, “I don’t believe in half-measures. The only reason I kept him talking was so that he wouldn’t see it coming.”

  “So… what? He had to die, but he also deserved the mercy of a quick, unexpected death?”

  “It wasn’t about what he deserved, it was about what needed to be done. Besides, I don’t want to hang out here any longer than I have to. I’m out, that’s it, I hope he stays dead.”

  We both stayed quiet until I got to the door, at which point Quinn let out an amused little sound, “Well, even though it got messy, at least you’re on a proper quest now?”

  “How’s tha-oh, heh, the dragon?” I chuckled, bringing some warmth back to my chest as I struggled to not think too much about how I’d killed Tony.

  “Exactly, now you get to tell everyone you went on a quest, and I confirm it for you…” Quinn trailed off as a realization dawned on us both, snuffing out what little flame had been lit inside me.

  “We haven’t really talked about what happens when we finish up here, huh?” I said, my hand holding onto the door’s handle like it was a lifeline.

  “Do you think you’ll come back here when you’re done?” Quinn asked without any sign of hope in her voice.

  “Honestly?” I replied, ready to lie to make her feel better before deciding against it with a defeated sigh, “No, I don’t think I’ll be comin’ back.”

  Quinn didn’t respond for a time, clearly processing what I’d just told her and probably wondering if she had the capacity to cry, “I suppose it wouldn’t make sense for you to come back,” she finally said, “especially considering you’re going to have to run off to wherever it is you’re going when we’re done, which doesn’t really leave a lot of room for us-the game.”

  “Not really, no,” I said as I ignored her little slip and opened the door, revealing the brilliant green portal to our final destination in an otherwise completely empty room, “and I don’t know if they’re gonna just be sitting there waiting for me to log back in.”

  “Exactly,” Quinn replied, trying her best to sound understanding, “wouldn’t want to end up getting devoured by the security system.”

  “Glad you’re being so understanding.” I said before taking a step toward the portal which seemed to be pulling me in closer, “Is this portal any different from the others?”

  “You mean the fact that it has some sort of gravitational pull? Yeah, I think this is the one we’ve been looking for.”

  “Well, thank God for that…” I muttered as I inched another foot closer, “Do you think we’ll get through it alright?”

  “All I can say for sure is that Messiah got through, and I doubt that he’s any more capable than you.”

  Hoping that Quinn wasn’t simply complimenting me to make me feel better, I took another step forward, “You ready?” I asked, not quite sure if I wanted to hear the answer.

  “No,” Quinn half-heartedly laughed, “but I doubt I’m going to be any time soon. It’s been a lot of fun.”

  “It really has, hasn’t i-”

  Suddenly the portal sucked me the rest of the way in, part of me anyway. I’d started to get broken down into pixels the second I was in range of the glow, and before I knew it I was gone, with nothing but the feeling of my body being disintegrated and put back together over and over again.

  It was like I was chocolate powder in a milkshake.

  For your information, you do not, by any means, ever want to be chocolate powder in a milkshake.

  THE FINAL FIGHT

  I didn’t know where I was, or when I was, or anything, but I also knew everything. I was being bombarded with blinding lights, but I couldn’t see, and the sound was unbearable, but I couldn’t hear.

  There was some part of me that knew I was screaming, but that was impossible because I didn’t have a mouth.

  I didn’t know where I ended and the universe began.

  Then, somewhere in the distance, in some deep, dark corner of my mind, I heard Quinn shouting out for me.

  “Eddie!” she cried while I continued to scream silently, “I can fix this! I can… God I hope I can fix this… Just hold on, okay!? I’m going to try to ground you with Messiah!”

  I was fading away, yet I was also becoming ethereal and forever. My world was slipping away, my understanding of what was, is, and will be becoming fluid and indescribable.

  And then I was being strangled in a dark room on some linoleum by some skinny, nerdy dude with horn-rimmed glasses, a dreggy beard, and messy hair. Hipster Jesus was the best way for me to rationalize him with my soupy brain.

  That’s when I had a revelation.

  “Hipster Jesus is Messiah!” I choked out as he started shaking me by my neck, smashing the back of my head into the k
itchen floor over and over again while I was forced to look between his face and the oven behind me.

  “Die! Die! Die!” Messiah growled before reaching up onto the counter beside us and grabbing a knife off of it.

  That was enough to force a reboot of soupy brain that killed the soupy part, allowing me to catch Messiah’s twig-like wrist right before he stabbed me, turn the blade on him, and cut along his bare side.

  Fun fact, that was when I discovered that Hipst-Messiah was ripped.

  Surfer ripped.

  He also didn’t handle getting cut too well, shrieking like a parrot that was having its feathers pulled out before jumping off me and running away, escaping my grip and clutching his side as he let his knife clatter to the ground.

  Fun fact the second, that’s when I discovered Messiah was hung, if you know what I mean.

  … I saw a doodle.

  “What in the everlasting fuck was that?” I asked with a raspy voice as I woozily got to my feet and rubbed my neck.

  “That,” Quinn replied with no small amount of relief, “was Messiah.”

  “Yeah, no, I got that…” I gasped, looking around the kitchen I was in and waiting for all the crockery to turn on me, “I meant the-”

  “Oh, you meant the weird in-between code thing?” Quinn quickly rattled out like she was desperate to get the last word in, “Yeah, I have no idea, but if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say it has something to do with the fact that people aren’t supposed to be in here.”

  “You think?” I chuckled, “Why does my brain feel so weird? And how did we get here? And-oh my God, I killed Tony! And the Don! And…”

  “Yeah, it’s probably for the best that you don’t remember that brief eternity where you existed as little more than a few lines of code, so I went ahead and sort of removed that part of your memory.” Quinn said before continuing on with “In case you were wondering, other than the Code Jumper stuff your code was not complex, not at all.” before I could start freaking out about her tampering with my memories.