by Arthur Stone
The first infected had reached level eight. It was probably the same one who had prayed to Cheater as its god. It had been so worried by the empty operating table that it had rushed right towards it, forgetting to look around. For which it had paid with its life.
The personal history of the other ghoul was clear, as well. Except that Cheater couldn’t quite figure out how it had managed to reach level three with such an awkward piece of gear on its back.
The fight had earned Cheater a couple of Strength points. The System had to give out something for the slaying of even the weakest of beasts. A token stat point, if you will. So why not just pump stats on weaklings like this?
Only naive fools dreamed of that. There were hardly enough weaklings in a month of hunting to make reasonable progress. Hundreds of low-level ghouls had to be killed, if not thousands. And such numbers could not be slaughtered without attracting the attention of larger beasts.
Gutting both of the ghouls got Cheater a single spore. It was a good start. Despite the pain, he had taken down a couple of opponents and earned his first trophy. Better than he had expected. Now he would search the hospital, hoping that his luck held out.
Cheater had spent a whole fortune on his bow, so he really did not want to leave this place without it. He was a naked beggar. Once he reached that stable, he would have no money to buy a new weapon with.
And nobody gave credit here on the Continent. Not to novices, anyway. He would search every corner of this cursed hospital.
* * *
Perhaps March was right, and Cheater’s property had been carted off to the police station. Well, everything but that which had remained in the operating room. Namely the bloodied rags that had once served as his clothes. His vest, backpack, and everything else, weapons and ammo included, had been relocated. Not a single arrow had remained.
Those accustomed to thinking themselves agents of the law had the bad habit of seizing anything that could be used for lethal purpose.
What now? Where should he search for the bow next? At the police station? This city was no village, if March’s comments and his view from the window were enough to go on. How many police stations did a city this size have? And which would have his gear?
He had no one to ask, and trying to search them all one by one would be madness. Especially when he had no concept of how many there were, nor where they were located. A long search in a city filled with active hunters would be the quickest way to his next resurrection.
He’d had to leave the bow behind.
But not right away.
During his brief search, Cheater smashed the heads of several more infecteds in, and noticed the signs of bigger beasts. They had already been here. Their size and fearsome strength had caused damage the lesser beasts were simply not capable of. But for some reason they had abandoned the building even though plenty of edible corpses remained. Perhaps that was normal in the early stages of a city’s plundering. They wanted something tastier, or fresher, and there were ample opportunities in the surrounding areas, so they sped off without noticing the “god” locked in the operating room.
But that didn’t mean Cheater was safe. Clearing the building and the surrounding area of wimpier ghouls would hardly create a Garden of Eden. Perhaps a few tragically dangerous creatures would suddenly recall that they had left lots of food back at the hospital.
He had to take short steps, clutching his side as he went, but there was nothing to be done about that: he had to move his legs.
They’d hold up to movement, but not to monsters.
He had to stay inside the hospital for now. Bloodstained barefoot invalids certainly didn’t do any better on the streets in this world than the last. He would leave a visible trail and emit a powerfully attractive smell to the whole neighborhood.
Thankfully, he found some water to wash with in the kitchen. Afterwards his blessings extended to a set of clothes and some shoes. There was even a fire ax at his belt, though he felt less than confident wielding it. It was too heavy, and physical loads caused Cheater nothing but pain in his current state. The surgeons had somehow managed to sew him up, but only barely. Even his super-fast regeneration powers had been unable to cope despite the number of days.
March had mockingly suggested suicide in their chat. Perhaps Cheater would resurrect naked and barefoot, but at least he’d be healthy.
Cheater ignored his advice, of course. Though there was a sort of reason to it.
Chapter 4
Life Six: Refuge
Cheater emptied the bottle of medical alcohol into the glass jar, added water, shook it and tossed in a spore, and began to slowly stir the resulting solution. This was his second serving today. His scale was at maximum. In fact, it was overflowing a bit, in an unnerving red color, but he knew that frequent gulps of lifejuice sped up regeneration a little, and that was most important right now.
Good nutrition helped with regeneration, too. But hospitals never had good nutrition.
So Cheater had managed to make his way to a residential area without any unwanted adventures along the way. He was on the third floor of a five-story apartment building. It was old, with terrible layouts, tiny rooms, and treacherously low ceilings, but he couldn’t take the risk of looking for something better. Even as it was, he had barely escaped the notice of at least two dangerous infecteds.
They had checked the building before him. Otherwise Cheater might not have managed to get the doors open. Thankfully they were still on their hinges, however tenuously, so partly closing them was no problem. As barriers go, that was a symbolic one at best, but it made Cheater feel better.
This was Cheater’s second day in this apartment. Eating and sleeping occupied his time, and they were just what his body needed. What else was there to do, anyway? He tried reading, but the former tenant had possessed a peculiarly specific taste in literature. The kind that caused incessant fits of yawning. He might try looking out the window, but the trees had grown too thick in front of it, allowing him to see virtually nothing. Once, he managed to see a couple of smaller ghouls bumbling after a fleeing feline, but that was all. At night, he could tell fires were raging.
There was no point to guessing the precise cause. When the ghouls came to a city, they always brought chaos, death, and unquenchable flame. Industrial sites that required continual control were left unwatched, and that often caused chemical fires or explosions. And the crazies that cropped up in the early stages of infection loved matches and torches. No firefighters could cope with the flames, especially once their minds went to mush, so conflagrations became wildfires, spreading from one building to another for weeks. Beyond the tedious books, these tenants had also left a legacy of veganism.
Everywhere he looked, probiotics, whole grain cereals, and herbal teas. Not enough calories for him, not enough protein, and not enough long-lasting food. Cheater did not dare to open the fridge since doing so would be an act of chemical warfare, but he wouldn’t have been surprised to find nothing but kale and some berries.
Everything decent, he had already eaten. Besides one pack of pasta, salt, sugar, and spices. He ate the pasta uncooked, crunchy. The act might have taken him back to his college days, if he had had any memory of them. Hard noodles were not the best food for a man suffering from a severe injury to the intestines.
It was time to move.
* * *
He detected no sound, and almost no smell, by the entrance. It was the absence of olfactory factors that had made him choose this place two days back. Each of the first two buildings had nearly made him vomit from the stench. He figured it was best to find a normal location than deal with two days of clothespins.
Each floor had three apartments. He made his way to one with solid-looking embossed doors. Perhaps these tenants had had something to hide, something to keep secure. In which case they might have had rich stores of food.
Their castle had been sacked. Nearly all of the furniture had been smashed by infecteds, so it was difficult for Ch
eater to move around without making noise. But there was no blood, nor any dry bones. The tenants must have escaped before the party started.
Unless, of course, the party guests had been the tenants themselves. Or to be more precise, the uninvited parasites within their bodies.
No matter. Cheater wasn’t here to play Clue.
More like Hungry, Hungry Hippos. He found enough for a day: canned fish and vegetables, pickles, a couple of five-liter bottles of water, a dried loaf of bread, and a few onions. It wasn’t much, but it would do.
He dragged his loot into his new lair, then searched the rest of the apartments. Some were empty, others had a can or two. Gradually, his pantry grew fuller.
But the kitchens were not his only focus. Everything that could pass as a weapon, he passed into his collection. Even a replica of a medieval sword made the cut. It was dull as a donut, a worthless decoration only obtained by those whose greed was too great to let it end up over someone else’s hearth—but now it was Cheater’s.
He stepped on something hard as he entered one of the last apartments. It was a red plastic and brass cylinder.
He picked it up. Twelve gauge. From a gun of meager power, sadly.
But an apartment with something like this at the threshold deserved special consideration.
He picked up four more of the cartridges from around the floor. Eventually, he found the gun safe. Perhaps “safe” wasn’t quite the word—it was just a tin box with a simple padlock, mounted to the wall with three thick screws. The door was open.
Inside he saw only some papers, and empty belt for cartridges, and various tools for cleaning and caring for a gun. Whoever had lived here had taken everything of value.
Hang on. Cheater shuffled the papers. At least it was something.
A pistol! He picked it up. An airsoft pistol. It was a worthless toy. Good for shooting beer cans from a few paces away.
But Cheater grabbed it anyway, as a promising thought began to form in his mind. He opened the gun and saw that it was powered by an air canister in its handle. Metallic balls were inserted into its ammo stores.
There was some alternate ammunition, too. The gun wasn’t suitable for all cases, just for weaklings, but he didn’t have many options.
In the wardrobe, he found hunting camo. Thankfully it fit. Camo was camo, and it might help.
Just as he was turning to leave, he noticed something.
One of the wardrobes had something different about it. Its bottom half was noticeably different than its top. Different dimensions. It didn’t take much examination to find the handle, though it was cleverly hidden. When he pulled it, the triggered movement of the false wall came as no surprise.
Note: You have found a low-level cache with ambiguous contents. Your Perception has increased by 7 points and your Luck by 1. Always keep an eye out. Paying close attention to your environment will be rewarded with valuable finds and stat progress points.
Woot. Some progress for his stats, without even needing to fight for it. And a cache of stuff, to boot. The last time Cheater had found such a place, it had given him a pretty good gun. But what did “ambiguous contents” mean? The System was unpredictable. This cache could hold a seppuku instructional video in Portuguese. Or some weapon-grade plutonium.
The reality was disappointing. Even a seppuku tutorial might have use to some, but not to him, a physically unwell person trying to survive alone in a city overtaken by zombies. Why the hell would he need a set of niche sex toys?
Another one of the System’s jokes at his expense.
He closed the cache without even touching the “treasure,” and turned to leave, but then he froze again at the next unusual noise. Thankfully, it was coming from outside.
He definitely didn’t want any of that kind of surprise.
Approaching the window, Cheater stood safely back, barely close enough to look out. There were no blinds to shield him. In fact, the window was slightly ajar. He could hear the sound growing rapidly: a car, driving through the city. That was unusual.
The sound reached its peak, then grew quiet just as quickly. He never saw the car. After the engine’s sound had disappeared, he heard machine-gun fire rumble in the distance, and the silhouettes of running infected flashed below. They were weaklings, but in decent number, about a dozen in all.
Rushing towards the machine gun noise. They would not run for long and would lose interest if no new sounds came their way.
Who would take a ride through a city like this? It could be anyone, from the most honest of immunes to the most cruel of bots, killers generated by the System. Or perhaps the mysterious and terrifying razers, who loved technology. Cheater had no great desire for company. He’d stay still for a while and they slip out of town, somehow.
* * *
One 4.5mm bullet was unable to cripple even the weakest of ghouls. It would break their skin, but wouldn’t go deep. Likely, it would only make them angry.
But that was enough for Cheater. He immersed the twelve bullets into a bowl of the flakes left over from lifejuice production and left them to dry. Some of the poison would be blown off when the gun was fired, but a little would remain, and get under the skin.
These flakes were deadly poison for immunes, and harmful to infecteds, too. They would kill the smaller ones and briefly paralyze the big ones. Most importantly, they would do so instantly. The same trick would not be possible with ordinary bullets, as the poison wouldn’t survive the firing process. Probably because of the temperature, though Cheater wasn’t sure. An airsoft gun barely produced any heat. Not simply because there was no powder flash. No, the metal of a bullet was mainly heated up from friction as it moved along the inside of the barrel. That reduced its speed greatly, and thus the heat, so it should work.
It did disturb Cheater a little that he had never heard of anyone else using this method. Novelty wasn’t always a virtue. Especially when its source was a moron. He could ask March, but Cheater preferred not to bother the more experienced player with every little trifle, and he could find out on his own easily enough.
Alright, Cheater. Let’s think about this. Was there any point to carrying a weapon like this when he had no hope of penetrating the coarse skin of infecteds around level ten? Not to mention higher levels.
It would help against lower levels, though. The prospect was drool-worthy: a silent weapon capable of taking down six weak runners in a few seconds. What were the cons? The weapon’s weight and space requirements were near to zero.
He could forego carrying the ax he had collected from the hospital. Too heavy and uncomfortable. Cheater did find a more convenient ax in one of the apartments and fashioned a leather belt for it.
He still carried a bow. Sadly not the one he had blown a mountain of spores on. Cheater had not found that bow, nor did he intend to look for it. Unhappily, he was forced to accept his loss.
This bow, he had made himself, using materials and tools from the various apartments. It was a rough piece of cheap wood reinforced with plastic and steel, all wrapped in tape, adhesive, and plaster. It was exactly what a weapon from the most desolate era after an apocalypse would look like.
The description which the System assigned the bow failed to gladden Cheater’s heart.
A laughable bow made by a total amateur. Simple weapon. Known properties: Unreliable Cannot accept modifiers.
Humiliating. If he were a perfectionist, Cheater would burn this creation in the fireplace and loot the shelves for anything on woodworking.
He had no such intentions. The bow was a ranged weapon, no matter how poor. Arrows were the next step.
With flake-poisoned tips, of course.
Chapter 5
Life Six: Urban Extinction
Smelling the stench of decomposition, Cheater froze. Odors like that always required a full stop and analysis of what you were dealing with. He was likely smelling a portion of the remains of humans and animals which filled the city. But the smell could also be coming from a ghoul with
a heavily-wounded limb, or from one who was unhurt and was wolfing down corpsemeat.
Cheater notice no movement besides the clouds covering and uncovering the unfamiliar stars in the sky. He feared that the Continent’s pale moon might poke out and cast a floodlight on the street he was trying to surreptitiously cross, using a narrow, permanent traffic jam as cover. Infecteds also had worse visual acuity in the dark, which was why he was moving at night.
Though some said that the time of day was of no consequence to the more powerful beasts. He had yet to run into any of them, thankfully. But packs of young zombies were everywhere. Slipping through them unnoticed was his best shot at avoiding an attack from the whole neighborhood.
A few minutes passed, and he noticed nothing suspicious. Where was the stench coming from? It could have just been rotten meat left in some truck. Yet another false alarm to keep Cheater in this hellhole. So much time had already been wasted.
Keeping behind the cars, he reached the other side of the street with a hobble, his aching side straining under its heavy load as he slipped across a small open stretch and crouched down beside a grocery store. Abandoned shopping carts provided a little cover, and the darkness was the most thick here. It was a good place for taking a thorough look around.
Which Cheater had to do after braving the relatively high visibility he had crossing the road. He noticed something.
Movement in the distance, down the very road he had just crossed. Cheater squinted. Right, someone was definitely coming this way. Just someone, not some-many? The approaching shape seemed narrow enough to be one beast. Maybe two. Maybe even three. But probably one single, hefty monster.
