by Arthur Stone
Arthur Stone
Respawn: 18 and Up
Contents
Arthur Stone
Respawn: 18 and Up
Chapter 1
Life Six: Fresh Linen
Chapter 2
Life Six: Blood and Gloom
Chapter 3
Life Six: Unauthorized Discharge
Chapter 4
Life Six: Refuge
Chapter 5
Life Six: Urban Extinction
Chapter 6
Life Six: The Intersection
Chapter 7
Life Six: Underground Meat Grinder
Chapter 8
Life Six: Cannibal Alarm Clocks vs. the Nudist
Chapter 9
Life Six: A Quick Ride
Chapter 10
Life Seven: Better Than a Dorm
Chapter 11
Life Seven: Imprisoned
Chapter 12
Life Seven: Fatal Luck
Chapter 13
Life Seven: Haystack Needle Magnet
Chapter 14
Life Seven: Safe, Safer, Safest
Chapter 15
Life Seven: Routine
Chapter 16
Life Seven: Bargaining
Chapter 17
Life Seven: Quest Monster
Chapter 18
Life Seven: The House on Chemist Street
Chapter 19
Life Seven: Return to Pyramid
Chapter 20
Life Seven: Cuffs
Chapter 21
Life Seven: More Digis
Chapter 22
Life Seven: The Trump Card
Chapter 23
Life Seven: Mysterious Comrade
Chapter 24
Life Seven: Water, Water
Chapter 25
Life Seven: Adrenaline Pump
Chapter 26
Life Seven: New Adventures
Chapter 27
Life Seven: New Acquaintances, New Impressions
Chapter 28
Life Seven: The Night Terror, and Half of HQ
Chapter 29
Life Seven: March’s Quest
Chapter 1
Life Six: Fresh Linen
A roadside motel is a great choice for a player looking to sleep both in comfort and with minimal risk. The building itself was out in the middle of nowhere, with no towns or cities nearby. It was only two stories tall and was surrounded on all sides by respectable trees. Meaning that nothing could spot it from any distance. The proximity of the road was troubling—Cheater had learned that infecteds liked to use paved roads for their frequent migrations. At least the asphalt was a good five hundred feet from the road, with its own driveway winding into the trees, which hid the walls of the motel itself from view. The sign out by the road was a bit distressing, but ghouls were not known for their high literacy.
Cheater couldn’t detect anything smelling like food. That was good. That evening, he took the time to examine both floors. Not a single gnawed bone to be found. The guests and staff must have abandoned the site immediately after the cluster reset. Their fragrant remains were attracting infecteds somewhere else. The beasts were drawn to meaty aromas, no matter their degree of freshness, and to the sounds that betrayed the presence of humans or animals. Picturesque forest settings did little for them.
And despite all of the ways they were different from men and women, they did still have less visual acuity during night than during the day.
So Cheater spent the night in civilized fashion. He wasn’t out under an elderberry bush or a cover of damp moss, shivering every time a mouse or a grasshopper disturbed the quiet of his immediate area. No, his bed was adorned with clean sheets, a warm blanket, and soft pillows. A hot shower and meal would have made the night complete. He did manage to obtain the latter by warming up a can of stew on a burner. But no shower was forthcoming.
Still, it was a good night. He almost felt like breathing a prayer of thanks to the System. Gratitude for a fresh, warm room free of the annoying mosquitoes that lived in this area.
Perhaps he really should have uttered that prayer. Before the morning’s gentle rays could poke through the window blinds, the sound of two vehicle engines began rattling the glass.
Cheater slept lightly, so he woke at the noise, dressed quickly, and cursed the lapse in his vigilance. He shouldn’t have been sleeping in nothing but underwear.
As he pulled on his pants, the engine reached its loudest yet, then cut to silence.
Whoever was driving by had stopped at the motel and cut their engines.
He looked out through the blinds. It was best to get a feeling for the situation before rushing out.
Two vehicles typical of the Continent were parked haphazardly in the motel lot. Heavy trucks reinforced with steel plating and grates. There was nothing special about them. Nothing more special than all of the other such trucks he had seen, anyway. No covered turrets graced their roofs; just open-air machine gun installations. Their owners weren’t rich enough yet to afford some decent equipment.
Perhaps that explained the eagerness with which they dispersed, splitting up in all directions from their trucks. Yet one thing made him doubt they had come to fight or loot: They were carrying a pair of occupied stretchers into the motel. Bringing in their wounded. There was no point to bringing cripples to an assault. This group was here to provide them with medical care, in a comfortable environment. The simplest operation by Continental standards—stitching up torn muscles—was a nigh-impossible feat in a shaky truck on bad roads. Most of the combat-ready members of the group busied themselves with routine exploratory tasks, inspecting the whole area for any threats, not just surrounding the building as an untrained observer might suspect.
The vehicles had no meaningful markings on them. These weren’t bots. They were players. But that didn’t make Cheater feel any better. In this world, even when you were in one of the safe stables, a drunk man had to keep one eye sober. And maybe grow a few more eyes lest he miss some threat looming in the nearest glade or gully.
“Dammit. Was one night in some clean sheets really too much to ask?” Cheater muttered as he stepped back from the window.
Seizing his backpack and slinging his bow behind his back, he held his silenced pistol at the ready and slipped out of the room.
Thankfully, the motel was relatively large. It would take them plenty of time to clear it. Cheater knew the layout well, too, thanks to his reconnoitering from the day before. As long as he could put that advantage to good use, ditch the motel, and dissolve into the woods in time, he’d be in the clear. There was a young, strong ash tree just a few paces away from the building. It would block him completely from view.
Cheater descended a service stairwell to the motel kitchen on the first floor. Just as he closed the door, he heard the sound of glass breaking outside. Exploding. Someone had charged into the hotel lobby without bothering to waste any time on the lock. The group carrying the stretchers must have been in a hurry. But they were simply too late to interfere with him.
Slipping out the back door, Cheater made for the thickets. Before he reached them, though, he stopped and went tense.
“Halt! Don’t turn around! Drop the gun. Now!”
When you heard that from behind your back, it was usually not a good idea to object. You could object internally, of course, but voicing those objections carried a considerably high probability you would find yourself rushing off to respawn.
Cheater opened his hand and dropped his pistol, raised his hands, and began to turn slowly, speaking calmly.
“Calm down. I didn’t want to shoot any
one. Just wanted to leave. That’s all.”
“I’m calm as a corpse,” the man grunted back. “Well, come on, Goldilocks, show us your face. But make the slightest move and I’ll fill you full of lead.”
Cheater had at last turned enough to see the one speaking. He was unremarkable, about thirty and all dressed in camouflage. The man even had a bandanna pulled down to his eyes, and his outfit was decorated chaotically with bits of foliage. An AK-47 rested in his hands, with an under-barrel grenade launcher. The man had his head bent left, towards his shoulder, so that he could nearly touch his tiny radio transmitter’s antenna with his lips.
The stranger’s gaze was riveted on Cheater as he spoke.
“Got him. He’s alone, like you said.”
Dammit. How could you be so stupid, Cheater? Were those intellectual blinders really off? Was he just naturally stupid? This world was nothing but ordinary, and anyone who forgot that was not long for it. So what that no one had seen him? That didn’t mean a thing! One or more of the group at the motel had a special ability. A very particular special ability, of the numerous such skills that existed here. Those lucky enough to be so blessed were called sensors. They were living life detectors, able to see through obstacles like walls. And ladders. And trees. Not literally “see,” but something like it.
And their skills worked particularly well on morons like him.
Cheater squinted at the half-open door and then widened his eyes in excitement.
“What do you mean, alone? My sidekick is back in the hall, and when he steps out he might be inclined to misunderstand the situation.”
The man’s eyes made a predictable twitch to his left, reacting to Cheater’s unpolished fib. But Cheater, still holding his hands in the air, somehow not even swinging his elbow, threw an ordinary nail right at the man’s cheekbone, knowing that he would not miss.
A foolhardy move, it would seem. But it was a battle-tested trick. Even if he was about to kick it to respawn, he would consider the situation a victory, given the circumstances. Not that a nail was the best of weapons, normally. But this one was sharpened to a fault, before being smeared with the flakes that remained from the sporejuice production process. Those flakes were a deadly poison. Once they took up residence under the man’s skin, they would instantly remodel their new home into a bag of bones immobilized by pain and shock. True paralysis would follow, locking up all the man’s muscles and then his lungs and heart, causing death.
The nail hit. The man screamed, jerked, and fell to his knees, limply lowering his machine gun to the ground. But then, he pulled the trigger. Whether out of compulsion or cognition, Cheater could not tell.
He was already charging towards the thicket—when a few more bursts rang out from behind. His sky-high luck was taking a day off. One of the bullets ricocheted off the asphalt and up towards his flesh. It sliced into him just above his left buttock at a steep angle and tore all the way up to his upper ribs.
Still he ran, even faster, somehow keeping his feet. He wasn’t about to turn around. They shot again, of course, but too late. He was crashing through the bushes. Still, the movement in the undergrowth gave his enemies a hint as to where they should aim, and some of their rounds pierced his backpack, entering the area where his neck became his shoulder. The invaders tore out of Cheater’s body, miraculously leaving his collarbone unbroken as they tore the strap of his vest.
But Cheater couldn’t take it. Perhaps his fall was for the best. He heard the thunk of a grenade launcher. It exploded dangerously close and showered him with branches and leaves, but they did not injure him further.
Or perhaps they did. Cheater doubted he would notice a few stray shards in his condition.
He rose and rushed on, incredulous that he had managed to get up. Cheater didn’t need to inspect the first wound to know that it was grave—and possibly fatal. That is, fatal unless he reached a healer in time. Or at least a surgeon.
Bullets continued to scream in from behind him, but he was more or less safe from further hits. The wide strip of bushes he had pushed through was behind him now, and no motion of theirs could betray his location. Now he was in a stretch of forest with little ground cover.
Unless the sensor at the motel could tell his accomplices which way to shoot.
Now, the man he had killed with a nail had drawn his weapon first. Cheater had not provoked him, so the aggression had been theirs. Meaning that at least his victory would not cost him any Humanity.
That was the only plus. Everything else was bad. He had taken a few bullets and was bleeding out, with no time to stop the flow. The shoulder wound wasn’t so bad, but the hip-to-ribs shot was a nightmare. He could tightly bandage everything up from the outside, but then the contents of his severed veins and arteries would just flow out into his abdominal cavity.
How long would he last? One hour? Doubtful. His bag did carry a consumable item that would delay his loss of unconsciousness a bit, if not his death. That was thanks to March, who after the last ridiculous victory of a group of bad guys had caught up to the fleeing Cheater and shared the loot from their corpses with him.
Including a translucent plastic tube concealing a syringe of orange liquid. It was the strongest substance he knew of here. Kitty had once arranged a battle dance up the back of an elite on the stuff. And her leg had still been broken.
Not just snapped, by shattered into pieces by a bullet from a high-caliber machine gun.
How much would a shot earn him? Ten minutes? Fifteen? Probably something like that. What help could that be? What would he get out of it? Spec was no cure, and no treatment. It was just a powerful but fleeting stimulant. Its best use case was assaulting a crowd of enemies and meeting a heroic end as you dragged as many with you to the grave—or to respawn—as possible. When you came back to life, the victory logs and XP earned would assure you your last life had not been a waste.
Cheater hadn’t encountered a single ghoul for an entire day, nor did he see any now. Never mind a horde.
Should he turn back? There were two truckfuls of players back there, pissed off at him. His chances would be slim. His only weapons were his bow and his spare pistol, neither of them good at long distances. The sensor would detect him if he got anywhere close.
As these thoughts raged through his head, Cheater continued rushing away from the motel. No reasonable plans came to mind. He pressed on until his legs refused to move any further.
But not for long. Uncertainty wrinkling his face, he drew out the syringe and injected it into himself. His lower limbs were filled with such strength that all he wanted to do was run forever.
So run he did.
* * *
Goldspec is amazing stuff. For a short time, Cheater stepped into a completely different reality. Here, his body was not wounded. He was a champion runner, with an unbelievable sense of perception. No tiny detail could escape his notice, not even one out on the very edge of his peripheral vision.
He took to his heels, like a gazelle fleeing a lion, but he had no idea how long this could last. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. He had no doubt that his run had taken him five or six miles, even though he knew distance would seem greatly exaggerated in this state of mind. Any pursuers would be far behind by now, for immunes were not inclined to run carelessly at full speed under any circumstances, and especially not after prey which had proved itself mortally dangerous. Not that they could hope to match his inhuman speed anyway.
But it didn’t last long. The surge of energy which had zapped into him at lightning speed began to subside as rapidly as it had come. His speed dropped sharply as his legs turned to jelly and his head spun.
The spec was running out. Not good.
Cheater had nearly come to terms with the fact that he had to pick a dense bush somewhere, fall into it, and die quietly, leaving his valuable items to be picked up later during his next life. He could still move his legs thanks to four factors: the dose of goldspec, of course, but also his Endurance, which was adequatel
y leveled up, the moderate nature of the wounds, relatively speaking, and the night of comfortable rest he had just enjoyed. That last factor had increased his Pleasure meter, and that affected everything. So even though an ordinary person would have collapsed after a few steps, he kept going.
A bright light shone before him, and he broke out into an open space. Cheater didn’t recognize the scene immediately, since his head was spinning at an increasingly feverish pace.
But at last he realized that the most straightforward way for him to prolong his life had just appeared right in front of him.
Cheater emerged onto a narrow, dilapidated road, an even more common occurrence in this world than the last. That was nothing to write home about, but the car along the side of the road was. It was an inexpensive low-riding car at least a half dozen years old, and an elderly man and woman stood beside it.
They wore ordinary civilian clothes and a little too much weight, which would doubtless be to some infected’s delight within minutes. Cheater saw no evidence whatsoever that they were armed.
Fresh digis, with no idea what’s going on.
Immobilized they stood, their gaze locked on the corpse at their feet. Clearly it was indeed a dead body, and not a fellow geriatric deciding the time was ripe for a nap. Its broken legs pointed in completely opposite directions, its brains leaked out of its shattered skull, and its clothes were now filthy rags. Perhaps it had been struck by a car, but Cheater doubted it had been much more attractive just before its death.
His mind was foggy, but still proffered a logical explanation: this was just a pair of digis who had decided to take their old car out for a ride in the countryside just after a fresh cluster came in. A low-level ghoul had come at them, excited by the noise of the engine, and had met its stupid demise under their vehicle. The poor stupid digis had concluded that they had just struck a living, breathing human. He could see the man poking at his phone, trying in vain to call the police, or perhaps someone else.
Approaching the car, Cheater pulled his spare pistol out of his backpack’s side pocket and awkwardly cocked it, then took aim upwards, intending to fire into the air to jump-start the conversation. But the woman saw him first.
