I had a gameplan. It was time to play.
I shoot with my left hand, so I leaned up on the left wall, pressing my shoulder to try and steady myself. Bringing the pistol up, I looked around for the red laser dot. It was nowhere to be seen, and I cursed under my breath. Then I realized I just needed to turn it on.
When I did, the bright luminescent dot showed up. It danced around as I brought the pistol to bear on the closest burner. What scared me was how much the laser wobbled around. You know, they never do that in video games or movies. The laser’s always nice and dead steady. It makes you think you’re a badass gunman. In that moment, I really hated games for making me think shooting and killing was as easy as holding Mouse1. Anyway, I have no clue how long it took for me to steady my aim, but I finally stilled myself enough. I had the dot trained on the head of one of the five burners.
Squeeze the trigger, don’t jerk it.
BANG.
> Wayne killed BERN_0634 with MSAP19
> Wayne +20 XP
I was proud as fuck. I really wanted to celebrate my first shot being a headshot. The first bullet I ever fired hit its intended target. Boom. Burner down. Too nice.
But there was no time for that.
The other burners immediately turned in my direction and started running at me.
THIRTEEN
BCZ White
If you think that I took those burners out quick…guess again.
After the first shot, adrenaline was surging through my veins.
That red dot was dancing around wild, flicking all over the place.
I was panicked. I just started popping off shots.
I don’t know how many shots it took, but somehow I managed to kill the second burner.
Three more were closing in. The figures with flailing arms were getting bigger.
I put up my arm, pointing it at head level. When the burner got close enough where I could see the redness in its eyes, I jerked the trigger.
Once.
Twice.
Three and then four times.
Six times.
I backpedaled to make some space for me to shoot the next burner, but it closed the gap scary fast.
I shoved the barrel of the pistol into something and jerked the trigger.
BANG.
I went down, falling backward onto my ass.
The body on top of me let out a last wet raspy gasp. It was dead.
The next burner plopped on top of the one that was already on top of me. The wind got knocked out of me and I wheezed. When I pulled back my arm to bring the gun close enough to shoot the burner, I jerked back so fast that I banged my elbow into the ground.
I lost the fucking gun.
It got jarred out of my hand and slid away on the floor.
I wriggled out from under the dead burner and scrambled for the gun.
When I shot my hand out to get the gun, I was on my belly. I heard the burner and felt his hand grab my calf. Instinctively, I knew I was a split second away from getting my leg bit, so I kicked wildly until I got loose. But I felt him clamber on top of me.
I whirled around, felt the barrel of the gun slap into flesh, and I fired away.
The burner slumped on top of me. Blood was flowing from its mouth and onto my shirt and pants.
I looked around.
Not a soul.
I took a few moments to catch my breath and gather myself. It was bewildering. When I got to my senses, I flipped open the console.
> Wayne killed BERN_0200 with MSAP19
> Wayne attacked BERN_0554 with MSAP19 for 2 DP
> BERN_0554 has 68 HP
> Wayne killed BERN_0554 with MSAP19
> Wayne +20 XP
> Wayne attacked BERN_0307 with MSAP19 for 2 DP
> Wayne killed BERN_0307 with MSAP19
> Wayne +20 XP
> Wayne killed BERN_0269 with MSAP19
> Wayne +20 XP
> Wayne killed BERN_0650 with MSAP19
> Wayne +20 XP
Then I checked my XP. I hadn’t leveled up, so I was a little disappointed.
Gotta keep up the grind.
I straightened myself out and went back down the hallway to the stairwells where I’d left the kid. When I got to the opening, he saw me. Then, with big bugged out eyes wide open, he squealed. And damn he was loud. Then he bolted up the stairs.
I chased after him, but I slipped on the stairs. There was blood on the bottom of my shoes. When I fell forward, I damn nearly broke my chin. The impact of my head hitting the floor almost knocked me out, I saw stars in the corner of my vision. I tried to shake it off and got up, tried to steady myself on the banister as I trudged up the landing and up to the second floor. When I looked left and right down the hallway, he was nowhere to be seen.
Not good. I couldn’t let Elgin know that I’d lost the damn kid.
It’s just training…it’s not a real kid.
But I stopped that kind of thinking. I knew that I would need to treat this like the real deal if I was going to grow, if I was gonna learn what I needed to learn to find and save Nyla.
I didn’t know what the hell I was gonna do. I wasn’t trained for finding someone. But luckily, I heard what sounded like a kid’s scream. It was up on the next floor.
As I slowly made my way up the stairs, I caught a whiff of rancid blood. When I looked down, I realized that it was all over me. No wonder the kid was scared and ran away from me.
I took off the combat shirt and wiped off as much of the blood as I could. Then I crept into the hallway and tried to listen carefully. It was quiet on this floor, and I realized that I had ringing in my ears from all the gunshots.
My next thought was that if I’d heard him, he had to be in the hallway. So if I just swept the halls, I’d find him unless he somehow got into an apartment.
Went down the hall and around a corner, and there he was, standing in front of a doorway a few doors down.
He was frozen still as a statue, staring at something in the apartment.
I whispered out to him.
“Psst. Hey buddy.”
He didn’t look. So I tried again, this time with a wave.
He snapped out of it this time.
With my palm held out to him low and slow, I gestured for him to come with me slowly.
Instead, he ran up the hallway away from me.
I crept up to the open doorway, where the kid was standing before. Inside, straight ahead in the kitchen, there was a small group of burners. A family from what I could tell. A man, a woman, and a young woman. Or, that’s what they used to be.
It was creepy. They were seated at the table, like they were having dinner together. Only there wasn’t anything on the table.
I guess they really do hang on to the way they used to be.
Quietly, I approached.
First, the close one. Then the one on the left and then the right.
Thinking back, it was spooky. Not the burners. Me. I’d gone from seeing them as a family to thinking of them as targets to prioritize and shoot.
For each burner, I pressed the barrel of the gun into either side of the head and fired.
Wayne killed BERN_39 with MSAP19
Wayne killed BERN_41 with MSAP19
Wayne killed BERN_40 with MSAP19
Wayne +60 XP
The kid must’ve been used to hearing all the gunshots from the operation that we were running, because when I got out of the apartment and into the hallway, he was still waiting at the end of the hall.
I tucked the pistol into my holster and approached him slowly.
“It’s safe now, don’t worry. The monsters aren’t gonna get you.”
I motioned at him. He hesitated for a few moments, but then he walked up to me.
I knelt down again to talk to him.
“I’m gonna take you to a safe spot, okay?”
The kid nodded.
With him following me close behind, I went down the stairs all the way to the lobby and out
to the parking lot. When he stepped into a rectangular zone that was outlined in glowing blue light, he disappeared. I checked my console.
Wayne saved NPC_Child_03
Wayne +5000 XP
Hunh. A child’s life is worth two hundred and fifty dead burners.
When I returned to the team, they’d just finished clearing another apartment.
Elgin frowned and stormed up to me.
“What the fuck happened to you, Wayne?”
She was practically stabbing me with that angry laser-like glare in her eyes.
“I ran into some trouble,” I said.
Elgin gave me a once over.
“How many did you kill?” she asked.
“Eight.”
She did that thing again where she was assessing me and thinking. From the slightest hint of approval I saw in her face, I could tell that she thought I could handle myself.
Elgin and Warner both gave me one of their spare magazines, and I followed along as they continued their sweep of the west wing, going from apartment to apartment, from the top floor down to the ground. She told me to watch the halls with Halstead but didn’t want me going into the apartments with them. “You have to be trained in room clearing,” she said to me. And then we went to work, grinding it out.
Apartment after apartment, we cleared the west wing.
Breach.
Enter.
Clear.
+60 XP
Level up.
Assign stat points.
Repeat.
It was a massacre.
By the time we got down to the lobby, we were exhausted and weary, covered in blood and smelling like gunpowder. We were lucky that we got that far with just a few knicks and scratches. There were cheap faux leather couches in the lobby, so we sat down.
As we rested, we started chatting about what happened and talked about tactics. There were about ten to twelve people who hadn’t turned, and each time we found them I ferried them to the evac zone and then made my way back to the team. There were a few people who were hostile too. They came at us with kitchen knives, baseball bats. One gang member even had a little revolver in his pocket. Elgin killed him lighting quick before he could pull it out.
We definitely weren’t expecting that people would be attacking us. We thought the burners were the only threat we had to worry about, but it turned out that people didn’t like the lockdown. They saw us as threats to their freedom. And there was all this pent up anger and frustration. The people didn’t say much, probably because the simulation didn’t know what to make them say.
The sun was setting, so we moved on out to clear the east wing. Elgin had found the keys to all the apartments in the central office, which was good because there weren’t enough breaching rounds. By nightfall, we’d cleared the entire apartment complex. There were over a thousand burners lying on the ground with bullets in their brains. With over 4,000 XP per person, the team had all leveled up—they rotated positions to make sure everyone was getting kills. Everyone was Level 6, except for Elgin who was at Level 7. The were all at Pain Resistance level 9, meaning they felt only 64% of the pain they’d normally feel. And me, because of all the people I was saving, I caught up to them.
With our job partway done, Elgin gave the command and I disconnected everyone from STESIS.
Getting out of STESIS was never something I got used to. When we got out, everyone grabbed a BPIS and downed it, me included. It was like medicine. Tastes horrible, but you just gotta eat it. Sadly, a spoonful of sugar didn’t make that medicine go down any easier.
While I was drinking my shake, I was partly mesmerized with the hum of the machines winding down. I was burned out and my mind had nowhere to go, and nothing in it.
Slowly though, as I came to my senses, I looked down and stared at my clothes. The hoodie and khakis I was wearing just didn’t feel right somehow. Not after all that I’d been through.
The team gathered around, pulling their cots together to sit and talk. To save on generator fuel, Elgin turned the lights off and we sat around the glow of the computer terminal in the middle of the warehouse. Elgin kicked off a talk about tactics.
“These burners are tougher than I thought,” Tong said.
Warner shook his head. “Yeah. I think it’s a waste of ammo to kill them at close range like that.”
Halstead had been sitting there with a pensive look, all quiet and all.
“You know,” he said, “back on the farm, we had cattle guns.”
“What’s that?” asked Addie. “You shoot cows out of a cannon?”
Everyone laughed.
“No, it’s also called a captive bolt gun,” Halstead explained. “It basically ’shoots’ a bolt out of a cylindrical device that you can hold in your hand, only the bolt doesn’t go flying. It stays in the muzzle. The thing’s about the size of the handle of a combat knife.”
Tong pointed a finger in the air like he had a better idea. “Or, we can just use combat knives. Our utility blades are too short, but a good ol’ Ka-Bar would do the trick.”
Warner shook his head. “I like Halstead’s cow gun. If the bolt is long enough to destroy whatever part of the brain we need to destroy, and it could be powered by something that lasts more than the ammo we can carry, I’m all for it.”
Halstead took a swig of water from his canteen.
“You know, I’m thinking that conventional firearms and tactics aren’t going to work. These burners are in place with a civilian population. All that heavy firepower the Army’s got isn’t gonna do shit. No way we’re gonna be able to get everyone out of their homes in time if there’s an emergency evacuation.”
After some more talk about the boots-on-the-ground nitty-gritty of killing burners in urban terrain, the conversation turned over to some fun stuff like zombie movies that they’d seen. I jumped in too. It was a good time with good people. And Elgin was pleased with her team’s contributions. She was taking notes when we were talking about the serious stuff—I guess she took her job seriously and was really dedicated to doing her part—and she joined in on the fun too.
That night, I felt comfortable enough to try to sleep. But I woke up in the middle of the night. My heart was racing and I was terrified. Bloody images of the violent deaths I’d seen in the exercise streaked through my mind. And it wasn’t just the gore and destruction of another living thing that was shaped and looked like a human being. I was scared because I could easily imagine that the scenario that BPMS was predicting could actually come true.
Since I couldn’t fall back asleep, I crept over to the terminal while everyone else was snoring away. Elgin was the loudest snorer, and Addie had a funny way of murmuring in his sleep.
Up until the sun started to rise, I searched the network for information. For hours, I couldn’t find anything.
Then, I hit a treasure trove.
I found some service logs, and I noticed this one laptop. It looked like the OS was upgraded. After cross-referencing it with the asset tag database, I found out that the laptop belonged to a director of some department or program. The OS upgrade forced the laptop to use only the latest memory interface, but the management software that was securing the laptop wasn’t supported. That left the laptop open for him to whatever he wanted. And I guess when he installed PointCloud on it, he accidentally set the option to sync all files. All I had to do was crack his PointCloud password, and I was in.
There were murmurs amongst important people that the National Guard wasn’t equipped to deal with a disaster of a certain size. There was a lot of pressure for people to stay in their homes, and there were rumors that the president wanted to put Army troops on US soil to enforce the shelter-in-place orders. Someone retorted, saying that that was what the National Guard was for. The only problem was that there were less than 2,500 of them.
What made me frown was when one person commented that there were only a fraction of them that were infantry.
Why would we need soldiers specializing in figh
ting if they’re just here to keep people at home?
After slogging through a lot more chat logs and emails, my mind slumped into a daze as my eyes glazed over. That’s when my thoughts wandered and I realized that I didn’t know what service branch Elgin and her team were from. I noticed that their uniforms were a little unusual, so I looked online and found some images of National Guard soldiers. The type of camouflage they had was the same as the Army soldiers who were being deployed overseas—a mix of tan, green, and brown. But Elgin and her team were wearing something different. It was a digital pattern that used geometric shapes and broken lines, and it was colored in shades that reminded me of asphalt and sidewalk, with muddled patches of very dull brick-red.
Who were they? A special unit? Were they even National Guard?
I wouldn’t find my answer. But I did find something more important.
I found out where Nyla was taken.
From what I gathered from all the documents I found, there was a quarantine operation. The National Guard was rounding up people in areas where there was a dangerous concentration of the virus in the air. There were several parts of the city where that was happening. One of those places was the area around Brooklyn Navy Yard.
People who were caught in the area were suspected of being infected by the virus. So they were taken to a biocontainment zone. There were different zones, and the one that Nyla was taken to was BCZ White.
BCZ White was located in a hospital that was a couple of miles to the north. Nearly an hour by foot, but just a ten-minute drive. It looked like they were keeping things as far away from the epicenter of the pandemic as they could. And according to what I’d found, the biocontainment zone was well-guarded by the National Guard.
After reading all of that, my eyelids drooped heavily. I needed to catch a couple of hours of sleep, so I ambled back to my cot and plopped down.
I needed to get to that hospital.
Pandemic Collapse - The First Horde: An Apocalyptic GameLit Thriller Page 13
