by Arthur Stone
This wasn’t a treasure chest. It was a tomb, and the raider was some beast other than he. But he didn’t leave. Call it sunk cost fallacy, but Cheater wasn’t one to leave a thing unfinished without a visible threat.
Yet clearly he was getting nowhere. Should he wait for dawn? Day would break to find him in a place with an unknown level of danger, surrounded by hordes of ghouls. They loved to march along the roads, and one of the city’s main avenues ran past this area.
Perhaps the tape-covered flashlight was his answer. But it barely gave off any light. It would reveal Cheater’s position before it revealed even an obstacle right in front of him.
Then, he had an idea. He moved in the same direction, but every five paces, he walked from the wall straight out into the underpass, until he reached what he felt was the middle. Then, he returned to the wall. Rinse, repeat. Theoretically, he would eventually find the pickup truck. Once he did, he’d use his little flashlight, or looting the vehicle would be impossible.
The method seemed like a guarantee, but it was definitely slow going. Cheater reached the other side of the underpass a few eternities later. Then, he went to the other side.
Where else would he go?
But it was there that things went haywire. Not right away. At first, it was the same tiresome process. Cheater started shivering, for he was moving too slowly, and the night was not a warm one.
But once he reached somewhere near halfway through the underpass, he lost the wall. It was just gone.
At first, he thought it was one of those alcoves tunnels often featured for service personnel, or as points of refuge in case of emergency. But as he groped about, he was soon convinced that the hole was massive.
It was no alcove. A store? An alcove? Another road? It couldn’t be another road. The angle was sharp, not smooth as a turn in the road demanded.
What now? How could he continue his search when he didn’t even know what kind of space he was in? This “underpass” dungeon had a much more complicated layout than he had deduced from his binoculars. His imagination was already seeing a labyrinth, complete with Minotaur.
At last he drew his flashlight—not the taped-up miniature but the Maglite—and flicked it on. For a few seconds, he saw nothing, as his eyes adjusted.
But even then, a surprised growl from just a stone’s throw away put him on his guard. Two nightmarish figures charged out of the darkness. Yet the game of light and shadows failed to deceive Cheater. It was only a pair of infecteds young enough that they still featured a more or less human form.
Low levels. They were only dangerous in crowds, or perhaps if they grabbed your throat when you were sleeping. For a level ten player, they were only a nuisance.
All the more so when he held an ax.
First, he pointed his flashlight at their eyes. Their sight was still quite human, so Cheater figured this would disorient them.
Yet the runners pressed on. Their step was less confident, but they reached him at the same time. He attacked his first target with the ax. His choice was a prudent one; the other target was smaller, less of a threat. That target crumbled with a kick to the knee, and perished with a sharp punch to the sporesac.
Both were dead. However, runners could kill from the grave, for they made that noise that drew others like cartoon characters to a pie. At least he was in a dungeon. Hopefully the noise had not carried to the area outside of the underpass, yet even so, they could be more ghouls here. A pack could even come rushing in.
Cheater shut off his flashlight and pressed his back to the wall, doing nothing but listening. Somewhere, water dripped rhythmically from the roof, accompanied by the gusts of wind howling across the entrances to the underpass. But there was no cadenza of grumbling, no percussion of running feet.
Had his luck held out? No. Several minutes had passed since the fight had ended, but it had not truly ended.
For no victory log showed itself.
The System didn’t always behave itself in the same way. But usually it displayed messages seconds after the last opponent was killed. Sometimes it took minutes. And sometimes it broke the messages up into multiple installments. Giving you a quick tally of infecteds killed and infecteds remaining in the middle of a fight, for example.
But the System never took this long to announce victory. Cheater had never heard of ten minutes going by, not to mention fifteen.
But there was one crucial thing to keep in mind. It might seem that the battle was over. But the System saw all. Perhaps a level zero walker which had detected him earlier, as he was trying to sneak by, was still following. Crawling, even. Grumbling. Tearing its knees to shreds on the rough pavement. An “aggroed” ghoul. Only once the infected abandoned the chase, fell hopelessly far behind, or was killed would the red message reach you.
Since he saw no message, Cheater knew—or at least suspected—that there was an enemy after him. The villain could be hiding anywhere, even just a single step away. Waiting in the dark.
He had heard stories of two-ton elites moving through a forest without so much as breaking a twig...
Goddammit. Cheater had no idea what was going on. Any fight where the enemy’s location and strength were unknown was a losing fight.
He made up his mind and flicked his flashlight back on.
It was time to get a proper look around.
Chapter 7
Life Six: Underground Meat Grinder
Only an experienced blind man could have dealt with the tunnel in the way Cheater had first been trying. Even with a powerful flashlight, it took him a while to figure out what this “underpass” had been for. He only started getting an idea after a few minutes of careful study.
There was indeed a perpendicular tunnel that started on this side, meeting the road right in its middle. Cheater had no clue what plans the engineers could possibly have had for this intruding passage.
Perhaps the project had run out of funding partway through, or been cancelled for some other reason. Clearly it had been abandoned years ago, and had never extended more than a hundred yards from the road. Piles of waste from the construction work lay at the end of the tunnel. The rest of the passage was littered with used needles, empty liquor bottles, condoms, and other kinds of garbage that made it clear what its residents had been like. The cultural residue was nearly thick enough to form a new geological layer.
Or, better, a scatological layer.
Cheater had been holding his back to the wall of the main tunnel, had assumed the side tunnel was a different road in some kind of interchange, and had nearly walked right into that pair of young ghouls. Perhaps they had even been here since their human lives. And perhaps their old druggie habits still bound them, like Cheaterism had bound that beast in the hospital, though they would have been unable to explain why they felt they needed to stay.
Thankfully only two had remained.
The pickup had gone underground in its flight from the elite only to encounter four sizable creatures rushing it head-on. In a jam, the driver had decided to take the turn, not knowing it was a dead end. Cheater could still see the tracks the vehicle had made in the rubbish—and the marks it had made along one of the walls, which it had skidded into. That crash, or perhaps some other jolt, had hurled the machine gunner out of the vehicle straight into the claws of the monsters. Shredded scraps of clothing and stray pieces of spent and unspent ammunition had been added to the historical record on the floor. The immunes had been torn to pieces immediately, not given a chance to transform into the black powder that their bodies became shortly after death.
The swipe of the wall had not stopped the pickup. It had rushed further down the tunnel. Which was quite short. So those inside had been forced to stop and evacuate. The scene was a familiar one there, too: shredded rags, ammo, and assorted weapons scattered about. All of the infecteds had returned to the surface once the crew had been eviscerated, save the pair Cheater had killed.
The System had still not given him a victory message. Cheater ev
en checked the logs in case he had somehow missed it. Nothing. Killing the runners had not earned him anything yet, which meant something was wrong.
So locating the pickup was double cause to rejoice. He’d rather meet the unknown threat with any one of the guns up ahead than with an ax in hand, especially in his condition.
But the System loved to complicate things. Infecteds, like bots, had the nasty habit of destroying vehicles and weapons whenever they fought immunes. Tanks and pistols alike ended the fight out of order, and often they were so far gone that all hopes of fixing them were dashed. So guns were always in demand, since they were hard to accumulate.
The first thing Cheater evaluated, of course, was the most powerful. The machine gun at the back of the truck seemed undamaged. Not that Cheater was an expert on these things, but he had seen these weapons before, and had learned as much as he could in the stable. It was an old but reliable gun, 14.5mm. It wasn’t a cannon, but it could mow down anything that hadn’t reached elite status. Even a novice elite could be hurt if you used good bullets and hit its vulnerable spots.
The rest of the guns were in worse shape. Cheater couldn’t tell how many people had been in the vehicle, exactly, but it looked like more than two. But of all their personal weapons, all he managed to get a hold of was an old worn-out AK using 5.45mm ammo, plus a Makarov pistol, just as old and just as worn out. Plus a couple of grenades, a disposable anti-tank grenade launcher, a crossbow, a “beak” in bad condition, and a couple of knives. The melee weapons had no magical properties, and the guns were unable to accept mods.
Either this squad had been extremely poor, or the ghouls had pounded all of the decent items into dust—Cheater didn’t even find any decent broken items.
But their poverty didn’t make sense, either. The back of the pickup and the cab alike stored all kinds of ammunition. Some of it went with the weapons he had found, but other rounds were for guns that weren’t here. Others were for guns Cheater couldn’t believe existed. 30mm artillery shells. A wooden box of 110mm mines.
Maybe these items were loot. The squad had raided a weapons store or military post of some kind but never made it out. Wait. If the squad had owned good weapons, they might have been bound, so they would have disappeared upon the squad’s death. Binding was expensive and only possible in certain cases, but it allowed players sent to respawn to collect their bound items from personal caches near their resurrection point. Cheater had seen one of these caches before. Bound items could not be stolen for long, and they could not be destroyed. Only the owner of a bound item could destroy it.
The situation was growing more and more depressing. No victory message. How could that be? Dawn would be hear soon, and Cheater would keep shivering at every rustle and rumble. This could all be thanks to some pathetic, crippled weakling who noticed him as he had approached the underpass but was now stuck, unable to get past the barrier wall running along the road that Cheater had leaped over.
But young ghouls had bad memories. A crawler would have given up by now. Cheater’s sense of foreboding was through the roof, and he was certain a definitive event was just around the corner. Perhaps literally.
He thought all this as he searched the truck and made some meager preparations. When you know a fight is coming, you have to do all you can to face it on your own terms.
A small searchlight sat on the roof of the truck. Cheater turned it back to point at the main tunnel. Starting it would quickly drain the battery, and firing up the truck’s engine would make too much noise, so he left it off for the time being.
Good. Now he could illuminate the field of battle, at least for a short time. Or perhaps for hours, if the infecteds gave him enough time to start the vehicle up.
He grabbed a coil of thick steel wire dangling on the side of the pickup truck and walked along the tunnel from wall to wall and back again, stretching out tripwires. Whether vandals or the forces of water and time had ruined the concrete, he couldn’t say. But he found many places to hook the wire. Even the stronger creatures would trip.
He couldn’t thing up any more tricks, however, so he proceeded to improve his armament. Of course he had already reloaded the machine gun—the belt which had been previously loaded was completely out of ammunition, as he had suspected. Six boxes in the back contained fresh belts of ammo. Fifty rounds each. They were very expensive, which served as more evidence that the squad had not been poor at all.
Cheater also found seven magazines for the automatic rifle and two for the pistol. Plus so many rounds elsewhere that Cheater couldn’t take the time to count them. Probably a thousand in number, if not more. There were even four dozen bolts for the crossbow. The players certainly hadn’t spared any expense as far as ammunition went.
With this kind of supply truck, Cheater could clear out the entire region. Assuming the elite didn’t show. Nothing could come at him from the sides or rear. It would be him and his arsenal against a single wave of charging beasts. The owners of this truck had been quite unlucky to lose their machine gunner at the moment they had. With him, they might have survived. He could have held the beasts back long enough for the others to fully join the fight. Too bad.
Cheater sat on a crate holding a few mines and awaited a sign. Either a grumbling sound, or the long-lost victory message from the System. He couldn’t do anything more to change the future.
Besides steel himself for the worst.
* * *
The System chose the first option. Cheater was already starting to pick at his nose in boredom when he heard a suspicious noise. A crunch, a crinkle, the creasing of a plastic bottle. He had made similar noises as he waded across the debris field.
Now, there was someone else.
At last he would see the reason why the System’s victory message had not come. But he doubted very much that it was a weak crawler. This beast was too cautious. It was trying hard not to make too much of a racket. Where had it come from? Had it picked up Cheater’s trail a while back, gotten temporarily thrown off the trail thanks to the spices, and then wandered about searching for a long time? Whatever the case, it was here now. He would think about how it followed him later.
After respawn, perhaps.
At least he’d make this life count. With all of this ammunition, he hoped to kill a decent number of opponents before he went to the grave himself. That should give him good experience to compensate for a lost life. Or even overcompensate.
Cheater reached for the searchlight and found the large button on it, squeezed his eyes shut, and pressed it. A powerful light flooded the tunnel. His eyes, used to the gloom, refused to open for a moment.
But unless the creature had been closing its eyes, too, it was temporarily blinded. Now to see whether it or the human would be the first to adapt.
The first to see the other.
Opening his eyes a fraction of a millimeter, through his eyelashes and tears, Cheater saw something rushing at him fast. The beast no longer had any concern for staying quiet, and it had already reached the halfway point. It was at least level twenty, and probably much stronger. But it wasn’t an elite. He had a good chance of winning this.
Despite the fact that he couldn’t see. He raised the machine gun and depressed the trigger. As usual, the burst didn’t miss, and the ghoul collapsed, its momentum carrying it rolling through the garbage. Cheater didn’t risk a pause to evaluate the damage. He took aim, fired again, and then froze as he blinked tears back at furious speed. That helped his eyes adapt and clear.
The creature was still moving, but with that characteristic twitching in agony that indicated imminent death. It wasn’t strong enough to handle a few blind volleys.
Still the System refused to give him a victory message, but he no longer expected one. The machine gun had alerted the whole neighborhood. Dozens, even hundreds, of infecteds were on their way here. Some would lose interest quickly, but others would persevere.
They would find the tunnel.
Cheater leaped to the ground
, scrambled into the pickup’s cab and started the engine, and somehow managed to turn it to a perpendicular position. Now the searchlight would last until the gas tank ran out, and then a bit more. It was now positioned to his side, rather than behind him. Now his shadow did not interfere with the light, and no incoming monsters would see a clear human silhouette atop the truck.
The engine noise didn’t bother him, after those machine gun bursts.
Everything was quiet. Including the System. He sat down to wait.
* * *
It was a short wait.
Three runners burst into the tunnel first. The searchlight showed them the way, and they took it at all speed.
Cheater’s crossbow knocked two of them dead, and the third took a blow from a beak with a long handle as she approached the car. This is a great melee weapon, as long as you hit the skull.
And I rarely miss.
Another weak infected followed and took a similar blow to the head.
Next, a raffler came with such speed that Cheater twitched, ready to rush for the machine gun. But then it ran straight into an outstretched tripwire and tumbled. Cheater’s Accuracy failed him for his ensuing crossbow shot, which missed the sporesac. He finished the creature off with two shots from the automatic rifle, both aimed at the beast’s left eye.
Tenacious bastard.
Thirty minutes or so after the battle had begun, dozens of corpses lined the tunnel. Most of them were runners, or even pre-runners, but there were also a few rafflers and a trampler. In all honesty, he was beginning to feel a bit disappointed. He had set up for a glorious last stand, placing all his hope on the machine gun, and yet he had only needed it once, at the very start of the fight. Even then he could have managed with the rifle or even the crossbow. He had only used the machine gun because his blinded condition had prevented him from knowing exactly what he was facing.
Stop jinxing yourself, Cheat.
